Even when a solution appears to work flawlessly, there can be unexpected problems that require innovative solutions. AllianceTek recently experienced such a situation while developing a mobile application for our client.

Our client is a turnkey telecommunications company that provides engineering, construction, fulfillment, and project management. Catering to all major U.S. carriers, the company employs management, field technicians, and subcontractors to ensure telecommunications projects are completed in a safe manner while maintaining quality standards.

The company originally sought the assistance of AllianceTek to develop a mobile application for their field force so they could securely access their SharePoint-based Project Management System. This allowed on-site technicians to easily send and receive information at any time and enhance company’s overall flow of communications.

AllianceTek’s solution was designed to transfer data through mobile networks, but even offline it can be used and will sync with the system when provided with Internet connectivity. However, while the resulting application worked seamlessly on all other providers, it had issues transferring data on the AT&T network.

AllianceTek began investigating this issue, which seemed to be unique in nature. The data were received from a web service in the form of a table consisting of multiple rows and columns. The web service joined the data tables to reduce the back and forth trips to the web server, thus improving performance.

In order to troubleshoot the issue, we started by optimizing the queries and pulling only limited data required at that instant. We then decoupled the web service to simply fetch individual data structures so the data were received in small chunks, one after another. Since this method appeared to work more rapidly, we once again coupled the data onto the mobile device to render the same result. This method greatly reduced the response time of web services.

Fortunately, this streamlined the entire process, and the app is now successfully transferring data on the AT&T network. While we found a working solution, AllianceTek is continuously working to enhance the transfer process through increased paging and sizing to deal with larger amounts of data.

For more information on this case study, visit mobile.alliancetek.com. Have you ever experienced issues with data transfer on certain networks? How were you able to devise a solution? Please share your experience and suggestions in the comments below.

Call us at 484-892-5713 or Contact Us today to learn more about solving data transfer problem on the AT&T network.